Sunday, April 29, 2012

The following article by Geert Wilders was published in Dutch at thr Dagelijkse Standaard website. Many thanks to a Dutch reader for sending a translation.

A note on Mr. Wilders’ book: we were sent an advance copy for review purposes, and will indeed be reviewing it.

Muhammad Manipulated the Koranby Geert Wilders

My book about Islam (Marked for Death: Islam’s War Against the West and Me) is being launched in New York on Tuesday. It posits that the Koran is not a book that was written by Allah, but on the contrary, one that was written by Muhammad. That is the truth, but to Islam that is outright blasphemy.

Islam claims that the Koran was written down by Allah in person before the beginning of time. It was written in Arabic, says verse 20:113. The original copy of the book — the Umm al-Kitab, the “Mother of the Book”- lies on a golden table in heaven. Consequently the Koran is of a totally different order than the Jewish or Christian bibles, which were written down by prophets or apostles. The Koran was written directly by Allah himself.

According to Islam Muhammad simply noted down what the archangel Gabriel read to him from Allah’s book. Whoever doubts that must fear for his life. That is why historic and linguistic research into the origin of the Koran are taboo.

In 1991, Suliman Bashaer, a professor at the Palestinian university in Nablus, was thrown out of a second storey window by his students because he questioned the historic truth of the Koran. A Lebanese or Syrian linguist, whose identity is known to no-one and who writes under the pseudonym of Christoph Luxenberg, maintains that the Koran cannot have been written in Arabic but was written in the related Syro-Aramaic language. His life, too, is in danger, because Allah himself said that the Koran was written in Arabic. Whoever denies that commits blasphemy. When Newsweek published an article about Luxenberg’s theory some years ago it was promptly banned in a number of Islamic countries.

Yet the evidence that not Allah, but Muhammad is the author of the Koran is overwhelming. When one reads the Sira, the biography of Muhammad written by Ibn Ishaq in the eighth century, it is striking how Allah produced texts that catered directly for Muhammad’s political, sexual and covetous desires. One must be blind not to see that Muhammad was an opportunist who adapted texts as it suited him.Take the example of the so-called Satanic Verses. In the early period of Islam Muhammad did not get much support in his home town of Mecca. His fellow citizens did not believe a word of what he told them about the so-called messages of Allah. As a consequence, Muhammad, who sought the support of the Meccans, allowed the Muslims to pray to Mecca’s main female deities. He said they were the daughters of Allah. They were perfect intercessors, said the Koran.

Later, when Muhammad quarreled with the Meccans, he revoked these verses, claiming that they had been inspired by the devil instead of by Gabriel. This story is in the Sira, but Muslims do not like to be reminded of it. Salman Rushdie incurred a death sentence for his book The Satanic Verses. The Japanese translator of Rushdie’s book was murdered; two other translators and the Norwegian publisher of the book narrowly escaped the same fate.

As Muhammad failed to convince Mecca’s polytheists, he attempted to win the support of Jews and Christians in the city. This explains why Allah was friendly towards them in the early verses of the Koran. But when the Jews and the Christians refused to recognize Muhammad as God’s latest Prophet, the Koran began to threaten them with hell and damnation. New verses commanded the Muslims to wage war on them.

As a result, many Koranic verses contradict each other. Muslims have solved this problem with the abrogation concept: Later verses overrule earlier ones. This, too, is something they do not like to be reminded of. In a speech in Regensburg in 2006, Pope Benedict unwittingly pointed out that there is a difference between the tolerant verses of the early period, “when Muhammad was still powerless and under threat,” and the hostile verses of the later period. At once savages burned down churches in Islamic countries and murdered Catholics. The Pope quickly apologized.

Muhammad not only manipulated the Koran for political reasons. He also did it out of lust. When Muhammad desired the wife of his adopted son, he forced the latter to divorce her. Arab incest taboos, however, did not allow a man to marry the ex-wife of an adopted son. And behold, Allah produced a Koranic verse (33:37-38) ordering him to marry the woman so that “it should become legitimate for true believers to wed the wives of their adopted sons. Allah’s will must be done. No blame shall be attached to the Prophet for doing what is sanctioned for him by Allah.

Muhammad also manipulated the Koran to satisfy his greed for material things. After the raid on a Meccan trade caravan at Badr in March 624, Muhammad wanted to have all the spoils for himself. Lo and behold, there was Allah with a verse (8:1) stating “The spoils belong to Allah and the Apostle.”

All this aroused the suspicions of Muhammad’s scribe, the man who wrote down the prophet’s revelations. The scribe renounced Islam and ran away.

This, too, is something the adherents of Islam do not like being reminded of. However, that the Koran was not written by Allah in heaven is a fact. The Koran was made up by Muhammad as it suited his according to his opportunistic goals. We must confront Muslims with this truth. Because only the truth sets people free. And if the truth is that the Koran is not the word of Allah, it does not need to be taken literally.

Geert Wilders is a member of the Dutch Parliament and leader of the Party for Freedom. He is the author of the book “Marked for Death: Islam’s War Against the West and Me” (Regnery). This article was first published in Dutch at the Dagelijkse Standaard website.

24
comments:

Anonymous
said...

Seems to me that Frank Baum and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer owe a lot in intellectual royalty arrearages to the heirs of the Probate Estate of Mohammad for that wonderful idea of the invented god (“I am Oz, the Great and Powerful,” “The Great and Powerful Oz knows why you have come”). Man, the idea of having a backroom god at your beck-and-call who ever so conveniently whispers into your ear the precise instructions of how to get the very things you covet, to be imposed on your converts under threat of divine damnation. Not quite a genie-in-a-lamp, but a genie-in-a-book gets you to the same spot.

Geert, great essay EXCEPT the last sentence which should be re-worded or deleted.

"And if the truth is that the Koran is not the word of Allah, it does not need to be taken literally."

If, as some experts posit, the subconscious mind fails to hear the word NO, then we must be very careful to phrase our counter-jihad ideas and writing using positive instead of negative words.

And yet, when I try to re-write the last sentence without using negative words, it strikes me that the logic is fuzzy here.

If indeed Mohammed was a deranged power-hungry lustful psychopath who made up Islam to justify his criminal behavior, why would any Muslim chose to accept any part of Mohammed's story or logic - even in a wholly figurative rather than literal way - unless, of course, that Muslim were attempting to morally justify his or her own criminal behavior under the guise of 'religion' and fulfilling the impersonal edicts of Allah's will?!

Islam MUST be fully abandoned even in a figurative sense in order for Muslims to gain moral clarity.

My personal opinion is that your atheism sneaks in here - although you work well with Christians on the anti-jihad issues.

Muslims MUST abandon Allah in all forms - and actively worship the personal God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

It is this personal relationship with God that will improve the behavior of Muslims - in a way that an atheistic void cannot.

Muslims have been choosing to act too bad for too long to simply be set adrift without the correct moral compass of Christianity to guide Muslims back to civilized behavior.

If the so-called prophet of Islam admitted to being fooled by Satan, how can anyone take anything else he says seriously?

There was no question of Jesus being fooled by the adversary - in the gospels we read of Satan tempting Christ in the wilderness, & Jesus recognising him, & rejecting him. No question about it.

So who are you going to believe? Someone who admits he's been deceived by Satan before, and could therefore be deceived by him again, or someone who recognises Satan, is not deceived by him, and who rejects him?

And so the fight back develops. Somewhat in confusion of course as to what is what, what actually is and what actually should be done but never the less, if the will is there then the means may, hopefully, eventuate.

My Christian upbringing teaches me that Muhammad was a false Prophet and so that also means the Koran is a false book. The Bible did warn about false Prophets and that many would arrive.

When I taught EFL in Istanbul a student asked me why Christians don't accept Muhammad as a Prophet. Being in their country I avoided giving a real answer. He was a devout Muslim, so I did not want to tell him that Christians believe he is a false Prophet period- end of story!!!!!!

I will have to buy Spencer new book after I read Michael Savages new one.

I've always found it strange that this deity that's supposed to have written the Koran did so as a corrective, and Mohammad was supposed to be the last prophet.

If this deity of the Muslims' wanted to correct all the mistakes that had gone before (this is the story apparently) and after over a score of previous prophets, none of whom could get the job done, apparently ... then it makes sense for the creator of the universe to pass the final, corrected, message on to an illiterate, so that it would be written down in scraps on leaves and stones, the odd sentence scraped on to old camel bones and the like, to finally be written down - out of sequence - by someone other than this final prophet Muhammad, many years after he'd kicked the bucket.

I don't think so! What an absurd tale!

About as plausible as Joseph Smith finding a set of golden tablets & using a peepstone while looking into a hat to "receive" the book of Mormon!

Luckily, it's irrelevant to me. What is relevant is that avoiding the use of negative words in my communications works to convey the message that I mean to send.

When I say, "Do not run," a child will keep running; but, when I say "Stop running," a child will stop running. Works like magic! Try it for yourself.

If there is any danger that people will subconsciously interpret and digest the following sentence without the negative words (i.e., not), then it is a danger worth mitigating by re-wording the sentence using positive words:

"And if the truth is that the Koran is not the word of Allah, it does not need to be taken literally."

@Egghead,One of my colleagues was a big NLP guy, wrote a couple of books about it etc. So we had a few interesting discussions about it. One was about the use of negatives in language etc, which is why I connected what you said earlier to NLP ...

Egghead here. Thanks to the NLP commenter. Before your comment, I never had a 'name' for the technique that I have successfully used since graduate school. I had read an article about the use of negatives in a scholarly journal in graduate school and never seen another item about it - BUT the technique WORKS with both children and adults! :)

OT, but what the heck, I'll join the party: if you want a kid to quit running, even though that is what kids do (not so hot at street corners), it's more effacacious to refrain from describing the less desirable behavior.

Thus, though "stop running" is light years ahead of "don't run", the best approach of all is an "instead" --e.g., "please walk when we're here. This is a walking place".

Always works wonders when kids are yelling to tell them "please use your inside voice. Outside is for yelling".

IOW, kids really do like to know what your rules are.

My 2 cents on communication. BTW, take a look at the wording above the comment box on the language rules in Schloss Bodissey...

[when I pointed these out to a Swedish fellow who claimed to be university professor, and compared it to how one would behave in another's house, I'll never forget his response: he immediately wanted to go to the bedrooms. Uggh...glad he was never more than a virtual "guest]

According to Islam Muhammad simply noted down what the archangel Gabriel read to him from Allah’s book.

Not entirely accurate; the sunnah and ahadeet say specifically that Mohammed RECITED (assumedly by memory) the passages, and that they were not actually written down until AFTER he died (and in the flurry, it is even said that there were other passages that were missed, which under this account invalidates the Qur'an).

A Lebanese or Syrian linguist, whose identity is known to no-one and who writes under the pseudonym of Christoph Luxenberg, maintains that the Koran cannot have been written in Arabic but was written in the related Syro-Aramaic language.

Most (if not all) credibly linguists maintain the Qur'an was in fact written in Arabic, but with up to 25% "loan words" from Ge'ez (i.e. Ethiopian, from when the Mohammedans went to seek exile there) and Syriac (from Myiaphysite Nestorian Christians). The fact is, many basic concepts, such as the word "book" did not exist in Arabic (the word used is "mezzahaff" which is Ethiopian). To people who speak these languages (I am one) it is very obvious, but you cannot convince someone who does not want to be convinced.

from what I remember, the idea was that there are no negatives in reality, something either happens, or ...

we imagine an alternative. But that alternative is not real, we're just making it up.

The idea in NLP is to use positive language so that the listener or reader has the image of doing whatever you're talking about going through their mind ... and having them create that positive image in their mind is very powerful & persuasive.

Instead of your language leading them to create an image of not doing it, or of doing something else altogether.